Journalist….Photographer…..Author

Austin Mackell looks at a poster of his missing uncle Kim Mackell near Blackheath, Blue Mountains

It’s a mystery that has baffled his family and police…an incident in which a man steps from a taxi to walk up the driveway to his home in the Australian Blue Mountains, but fails to go indoors. And has vanished.

Kim Mackell, a 64-year-old talented artist, has been missing since December 18 after travelling by train from Sydney to the mountain-top village of Blackheath, the closest community to his home on a sprawling bushland property, some 5km from the railway station.

The property was once owned by the late author Kylie Tennant, who wrote The Battlers, an epic work which won her international acclaim as the ‘Australian John Steinbeck’. So Kim lived on – and vanished from – a beautiful environment that inspired those with an artistic mind.

‘It’s a complete mystery,’ his nephew, Austin Mackell, 33, told me as we drove to the clifftop house where Kim has lived for many years, having purchased it with a legacy from his late mother.

It is there he has spent many happy days painting the scenes that surrounded him – one of his works, portraying a flock of flying foxes, has been hanging for a long time in a food outlet in Sydney.

‘The police, volunteers, State Emergency Services personnel and searchers in a helicopter have scoured every bit of land but there’s no sign of Kim anywhere. There were concerns he might have fallen over a cliff, but as best they can tell that didn’t happen. They just can’t find him.’

Hours after we had chatted in depth about his uncle’s disappearance, Austin spoke to three people in the town of Lithgow, 26km from Blackheath – and they all said they were convinced they had seen a man answering Kim’s description walking along the main street in the week before Christmas, the time period after he had vanished from Blackheath.

’They were 100 per cent sure it was him because there was a photo in the paper which they were able to compare the man with. They said they’d told the police about their sighting but it seems the police haven’t taken it seriously. They still seem to think he’s around the area where his property is in Blackheath.’

How could Kim, who has never married and who enjoyed his secluded lifestyle, have travelled to Lithgow? He had lost his driving licence following an accident so his van remains idle at the property and there is no sign of him having used his Opal Card to take the train from Blackheath to Lithgow.

‘The only possibility is that somebody gave him a lift, but so far no-one has come forward to say that,’ says Austin.

Kim needs medication for his bipolar condition and for a heart problem but that doesn’t explain why he should vanish literally after stepping from a taxi at around 10pm on December 18 and heading up the bushy driveway in the dark towards his home. Police have spoken to the female taxi driver who can’t help any more than telling them that she was the driver who dropped him off.

Family members picked him up on December 18 to drive him to Sydney where friends were preparing a barbecue. As they headed away from Blackheath Kim asked where they were going, because he’d been under the impression that the barbecue was being held locally.

Is this a lighthearted comment that caused some kind of panic in Kim’s mind?

Kim had a cider and a beer at the Sydney barbecue gathering with Austin before the event got under way, but his nephew is convinced that Kim wasn’t affected by alcohol when he was later driven to the central railway station to travel back to Blackheath. ‘He was lucid…just normal,’ says Austin.

He had been driven to the central station in a vehicle that wasn’t familiar to him – so did that cause added confusion following on from the jokey kidnapping comment?

It’s a thought that has been among many scenarios considered by Austin.

Arriving back in Blackheath, carrying a hessian bag containing a kilo of sugar that he’d purchased earlier in the day, Kim was not able to phone for a taxi because he’d left his phone behind at the house when he’d been picked up earlier that day. So he’d walked across the road from the station to a pub and ordered a beer while the staff arranged for a taxi to pick him up.

The driveway of his house in Shipley Road was pitch black, so even if she was watching him walk away the taxi driver would have quickly lost sight of him.

Kim’s family is convinced he never entered the house because the packet of sugar was nowhere to be found and there’s a report that a man answering his description – carrying a hessian bag – had been seen in Lithgow’s main street.

Another ‘sighting’ claimed he had been seen on a main road leading out of Lithgow, but whether Kim was ever there cannot be proved at this stage.

Missing poster of Kim Mackell

Austin, along with Kim’s family and friends, has put posters up all around the Blue Mountains towns but the alleged sightings are few and far between.

‘We live each day in hope,’ says Austin. ‘We live each day hoping that he’ll just turn up and we’ll be able to sit down and listen to his adventures.’

UPDATE: Austin has now shown ‘new’ CCTV footage of an elderly man walking along the main street of Lithgow to two people who were certain they had seen Kim. When shown the footage, the couple confirmed that was the man they had seen.

‘Unfortunately, he’s not my uncle,’ says Austin. ‘The man in the footage has a beard and Kim didn’t have a beard. So it’s back to square one.’

Where is Betty O’Pray?
How can an elderly lady, 77 years old, vanish into thin air as she strolled along a fairly well-worn track in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales??
Elizabeth – Betty to her friends – is believed to have set off for a walk along the track that leads from her home in Medlow Bath to the main Blue Mountains town of Katoomba, some 6km away, on Monday March 7.
A family member spoke to her on her mobile phone at about 11am that day but by 11pm she hadn’t returned home – so the police were alerted. They managed to contact Betty by phone but then lost the connection. In that brief conversation, she was not able to tell police exactly where she was, but said she was all right, although she was running out of water. She was in a clearing, she said.
In following days, helicopters flew over the area where she might have been, based on calculating the signal from her phone to its the connection with a mobile transmission tower. Teams of searchers grew, but there was no sign of the elderly lady, who had been born in Scotland but had lived in Medlow Bath for a number of years.
By Monday, March 21, Betty will have been missing for two weeks – and that’s a long time for an elderly person to be lost in the bush. She might be able to find water, particularly as it has been raining occasionally, but she certainly doesn’t have any food.
So where is she? Searchers have combed virtually every inch of the bushland alongside the track she regularly walked along. It wends up and down, but it’s virtually impossible for anyone to lose their way because it’s wide and runs beside a fenced-off railway line, which in turn follows the Great Western Highway. The sound of large trucks is always within earshot of the track.
For Betty to become lost after setting out that day she would have had to step off the main path and head into the bush. And while there are minor tracks she could have followed, search teams have been through them and also broken away into the thick undergrowth. They’ve called her name, they’ve shouted ‘Coo-eeee!’ – then listened in the hope of hearing a reply from the missing woman. But nothing.
There were reports of a resident living on a plateau hearing cries for help from the bushland below, but another thorough search failed to find any sign of Betty and there is the possibility that the cry had a reasonable explanation – such as searchers shouting to one another.
But how far could Betty have got, had she indeed struck off into the bush for an unknown reason (perhaps because she had become disoriented, as she is reported to have suffered from mild dementia)? She is unlikely to have been able to travel far into the undergrowth, which grabs at the face, entangles itself in legs, snares feet and has steep slopes that can easily provoke a fall.
Experts have rappelled down cliff faces on the off chance that Betty was down there but the result has been the same – no sign of her.
Teams of police, firemen, State Emergency Service volunteers and civilians have all contributed tirelessly, knocking on doors in a wide radius in the hope that someone might have seen Betty somewhere – perhaps as she walked into a built up area. Police have also asked for anyone who was in the Medlow Bath vicinity to provide them with photos they might have taken in the days before, during and after Betty first went missing in the hope that they might glean something from the direction she was walking.
A resident who lives beside the path told me that she spoke to Betty recently on one of her walks and the elderly lady seemed a little confused. The resident asked Betty if she was all right and she assured the resident she was fine, thank you, and carried on her way.
Perhaps there’s a clue there – that on the day she set out she ended up becoming disoriented. But it doesn’t explain why she can’t be found.
The search appears to be winding down. But it is to be hoped that everyone in the region remains vigilant. It would be wonderful to run a headline along the lines of ‘Miracle in the Mountains’.